From love to violence in a dizzying instant
Theatre The Winter’s Tale Barbican Centre, ‘Well-groomed and bland, he is the affable bloke next door who batters his wife when heads are turned’
How Shakespeare loves things happening “on the instant”. Hero, dying, as it seems, “upon the instant” of being wrongly accused of adultery in Much Ado About Nothing. Henry V “not angry” in France until the instant he learns the French have killed the boys guarding the English camp. Edmund, panting for life, drawing his last gasps, learning that Goneril and Regan are slain: “I was contracted to them both. All three now marry in an instant.” For striking instantaneity, though, it’s hard to rival The Winter’s Tale. Leontes, King of Sicilia, begs his wife Hermione to plead with his childhood friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia, to prolong his stay.
Her success in speaking “to th’ purpose” – which Leontes deems uniquely twinned in emotional significance to the moment she accepted his hand in marriage – should delight him, but it’s the trigger for a cataclysm of violent jealousy. “Too hot, too hot!” he exclaims. “My heart dances but not for joy, not joy.”
Winding up in London after more than a year of on-off international touring, Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl takes its cue from that lightning-fast mood switch. His version sheds text like so much unwanted baggage, and sprints like one possessed, the whole ensemble (not remotely footsore after so much travel) moving almost as one organism.
Orlando James’s Leontes bounds boyishly about, initially in a dumbshow of horseplay that emphasises his homo-erotic attachment to his bosom pal (Edward Sayer’s reserved Polixenes).
Thereafter he restlessly paces Nick Ormerod’s characteristically bareminimum set, dominated by a large white wooden container, the sides of which crash to the ground when the king madly disputes the oracle attesting his wife’s loyalty. There is, in austere addition, a wooden bench put to much versatile use, while Judith Greenwood’s lighting achieves potent shifts of colour and ambience.
This is a world at once highly theatrical, with Leontes arranging wife and guest in lusty attitudes of cuckoldry like some perverted puppet-master, and horribly familiar – unornamented, modern. Everyday irrational impulse is king. Initially in jeans and shirt, well-groomed and bland, James is the affable bloke next door who batters his wife when heads are turned. We see him (shocking, this) knee the pregnant Hermione (Natalie Radmall-Quirke), visibly forcing her into premature labour. He’s suffering, plainly, from man-child feelings of displacement.
His needy son Mamillius (Tom Cawte) gives tantrum screams, driving both parents to distraction. With another child on the way, the little boy in Leontes is desperate: a point brilliantly underlined by his kneeling, pointedly slighted, supplication at close of play, in a scene of pieta-like devotion beside his magically restored wife.
Before we get to that fragile resolution, and after the interval, the evening surfeits from too much wayward invention. The bucolic Bohemia scenes are (as is often the case) a trial – not helped by a hackneyed outbreak of line-dancing. Ryan Donaldson’s trickster Autolycus (a vicious thug, to boot) strums guitar, turns parodic chatshow host and cracks bad jokes (“Did you pack your fardel yourself?”). Groan...
Good in parts, then, but what’s good is very good.